[Master Thespian]
ACTING!!
[/Master Thespian]
You’re thinking of the Neutral Buoyancy Tank, where astronauts practice work they’ll be doing outside the shuttle (such as attaching parts to the space station or working on a sattellite) in water with carefully weighted spacesuits that allow them to float almost like they would in space (weighted just right so they don’t rise to the surface or sink to the bottom). There are also safety divers on hand at all times in cast the astronauts have any difficulty. The tank has an exact replica of the shuttle’s cargo bay, complete with a working robot arm.
In Armageddon, the film crew was allowed to use the Neutral Buoyancy Tank to show thier characters rehearsing their mission - I don’t remember if that made it into the final movie. I think it might have been used in Space Cowboys as well, but I might be remembering wrong.
The helium balloon trick is a great idea.
Slowing down the film is only a rough approximation. You can’t simulate the gait of someone in 1/6 G by slowing down the film.
The dust coming off the wheels of the rover is the toughest part, both because you need low-G and a vacuum to get it right. In fact, I always point to this as a shortcut whenever some goofball starts talking to me about how the moon landings were a hoax. My standard response is, “Here’s where you can find some footage showing the rovers driving around on the moon. Watch the way the soil moves after it’s kicked up from the back wheels. Get back to me when you can explain how they simulated that using 1970’s video technology.”
For filmmakers on a budget, the zero-gee stripping scene in Barbarella was done by having Jane Fonda lie on a pane of glass positioned in the middle of the set, then shooting down from the ceiling to make it look like she was floating in mid-air.
Robert Heinlein described how they did the zero-g effects in Destination Moon in an article in Astounding Science Fiction that was later reprinted in Focus on the Science Fiction Film and Requiem. The effects in 2001 were described in Arthur C. Clarke’s Lost Worlds of 2001 and in Jerome Agel’s The Making of 2001.
In a word, it’s “wires”, but saying that they do it with wires is like saying magicians do it with mirrors – sometimes it’s literally true, but to try and pass it off as simply “wires” (or mirrors) glosses over a hell of a lot of precision, craft, and artistry.
Of course, in a lot of movies they did it with matte effects, too, and lately an awful lot is done with computer compositing and animation. (think of the floating pens in 2010 for the former, and the floating globules of Klingon blood in Star Trek VI for the latter).
Mike Jittlov used the “Vomit Comet” for zero-g effects in one of his shorts, long before Apollo 13.
But only by the cameramen, if you believe Bill Paxton in an interview in this month’s Empire magazine. He claims that none of the cast barfed, “just those pussy cameramen” 
This is G.Q. and so, as a professional cameraman who has read through the articles on the filming of this NOT featuring Mr. Paxton, I will not use the kind of gutter obscenity I wish I could use.
Suffice to say that the cameramen I know have put themselves in harm’s way countless times (with proper safety precautions ) to make people like Mr. Paxton look pretty. I’ve been shot at more than once, and taken other extraordinary measures to get good shots.
Vomiting doesn’t earn that appellation. If that was indeed his descriptive phrase, so be it. He’s a liar.
:mad:
Cartooniverse
Yep, that was his phrase (maybe not verbatim, but that was the gist). As the was meant to imply, I don’t really believe him…